Skip to main content

First Post!

Welcome to the site!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Article Review - “Poetry and Writing: Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster

 The article I chose  was “Poetry and Writing:  Improving Fluency and Motivation For Students With Developmental Dyslexic Traits” by Dr. Benita Bruster,   Professor of Education and Interim Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Austin Peay University in  Clarksville, Tennessee.  The article was based on Dr. Bruster’s work in a fourth grade ELA classroom with a small group of students who had been selected by their classroom teachers because they were struggling readers (Bruster, 2015).  In her article, Dr. Bruster explains that she was a volunteer who was “interested in literacy” (Bruster, 2015, p.93) and was approached by the classroom teacher to work with five boys during “their regular small group reading time”  (Bruster, 2015, p.93) for a period of nine weeks).  She goes on to explain that the boys selected for the intervention were identified as demonstrating characteristics of “developmental dyslexia”  (Bruster, 2...

Early Reading Motivation article

Me and My Reading Profile: A Tool for Assessing Early Reading Motivation      (portrait of my daughter, Tess, age 7, reading her favorite series Ivy and Bean )         The article  "Me and My Reading Profile" by Marinek, Malloy, Gambrell, and Mazzoni (2015) discusses the value of assessing a young reader's motivation. It states that motivation plays as vital a role in reading achievement as other key skills (such as decoding and comprehension), yet motivation is rarely addressed in grades K-2. The authors go on to state that it is necessary to measure young students' interest in developmentally appropriate ways so that "literacy instruction can be designed with motivation in mind" (Marinak et. al. p. 52) and propose that they have created a useful tool with which to gauge students' interest in reading. Marinek et. al. (2015) state that "Without attention to reading motivation, some students may never reach their full reading potential...

My Reading Life-Blog Post 1

The fact that literacy is a fundamental cornerstone to a student’s academic success is extremely powerful.  I look at this from two different angles, my own reading experience and then my experience with my children.  As a young child I remember my teachers making reading fun. If we read multiple books, we would be rewarded with free pizza from Pizza Hut.     Now I see my children who are in kindergarten and first grade receive enthusiastic reader awards, which is accompanied by an award ceremony.  Chances are given to receive tickets to a baseball game for reading multiple books and completing a short book evaluation.  They have multiple opportunities to purchase books, which yields free books for their classroom.  Their teachers also make reading fun.  I have also noticed that at their current levels, they do utilize both whole language as well as phonics approaches to literacy.    The debate between the two differing ty...